"Some day someone will explain why the Romantics wanted to rewrite Paradise Lost and the moderns to rewrite the Odyssey. And then we will have a clearer understanding of why Ronald Johnson returned, as a signal act of the postmodernist period (The Age of Olson the books will get around to naming it), to Milton."

"Guerrilla movements can succeed if more than 40 percent of the local population supports them. While the guerrillas are a small proportion of Iraqis, they are very popular in the Sunni Arab areas. If you look at it as a regional war, they probably have 80 percent support in their region."